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Hardware marked "Patented" and "Pat. Pending" Printed circuit board by Logitech with inscription "Patents pending" "Patent pending" (sometimes abbreviated by "pat. pend." or "pat. pending") or "patent applied for" are legal designations or expressions that can be used in relation to a product or process once a patent application for the product or process has been filed, but prior to the ...
Leading open-source figures and companies [10] have complained that software patents are overly broad and the USPTO should reject most of them. Bill Gates has said "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today".
A patent application is a request pending at a patent office for the grant of a patent for an invention described in the patent specification [notes 1] and a set of one or more claims stated in a formal document, including necessary official forms and related correspondence. It is the combination of the document and its processing within the ...
Patents are frequently used to protect hardware consoles from cloning. Though patents do not cover elements like the form and shape of a console, they can be used to protect the internal hardware and electronic components, as Magnavox had used at the onset of the arcade game and home console clones. [53]
A software patent is a patent on a piece of software, such as a computer program, library, user interface, or algorithm.The validity of these patents can be difficult to evaluate, as software is often at once a product of engineering, something typically eligible for patents, and an abstract concept, which is typically not.
No infringement action may be started until the patent is issued. However, pre-grant protection is available under 35 U.S.C. § 154(d), which allows a patent owner to obtain reasonable royalty damages for certain infringing activities that occurred before patent's date of issuance. This right to obtain provisional damages requires a patent ...
The difference is that whether proprietary software can be distributed, and what the fee would be, is at the proprietor's discretion. With free software, anyone who has a copy can decide whether, and how much, to charge for a copy or related services. [60] Proprietary software that comes for no cost is called freeware.
The public-domain "free sharing" and donationware commercialization models evolved in the following years to the (non-voluntary) shareware model, [11] [12] and software free of charge, called freeware. [13] Additionally, due to other changes in the computer industry, the sharing of source code became less common. [6]